by Charlene Iannella

Created on: January 09, 2011

There was once a young girl who believed with all her heart in the stories she heard about growing up, falling in love and living happily ever after.  As she got older, she grew to know more of life’s harsher realities; that life is not always easy and love’s path not always smooth.  Yet, she still whole heartedly believed in her “ever after” love and knew one day that she would find it, regardless of how many people did not.  Until one day she did.  And she met the day after.  And the day after that, and she discovered that sometimes, people don’t always show others their true self until the days after, so she realized, sometime after her divorce, that while she still believed in being happy, she was no longer willing to attach the words “ever after”, as much for herself, as for anyone else.  In the end, it felt like she was tempting fate and marriage, along with happy, were just way too fragile to play with like that.

This is meant to serve as a reminder that while most of us grow up with a myth, we wake up with a reality that love, while beautiful, intense, passionate, romantic, and incredible is fragile and not an impenetrable institution as it may have seemed when the words “happily ever after” were first used.  As any woman turns the phrase over in her mind, I don’t think the question is does happily ever after exist but has become do we still want it to exist.    In a fluid society where change is the unchanging, isn’t it dangerous to put concepts like “happily ever after” out there and apply them to relationships, where the most change and flexibility is required of partners?  Do we ever want our daughters and sons to think it’s that easy, to sail off to a wedding day, say “I do” and coast through the rest because having been through it as the girl in the previous paragraph, I have to say, it was some of the toughest learning of my life.  I don’t recommend the hard way when it comes to love.

However, there is a spirit behind the words happily ever after that will forever have them cropping up on cards and in books because no matter whether they apply or not, they’re too magical not too use.  To answer the question, happily ever after exists in an endless amount of literature and movies, song words & poetry.  It exists in the hearts of so many young romantics who have yet to have a broken heart and the rare lucky few who meet the love of their lives and get to live with them too.  Happily ever after even exists for those of us who it didn’t work out for but wish it had, who know it’s not that simple, but still wish it was.  Happily ever after exists in an individual’s heart and mind more than on any page or in any real day of anyone’s life.  In that way, it will live on in a way that would make Cinderella proud.

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